Israel continues to claim that the hundreds of civilian deaths (including children) in its war upon Gaza are the result of Hamas using civilians as human shields.
Israel repeated this claim today in responding to the International Committee of the Red Cross' unusually blunt criticism of Israel wherein the Red Cross describes conditions as "shocking" (including finding infants next to the corpses of their mothers) and that it had to take the wounded out during the three hour ceasefire by donkey cart because of Israel's building berms making ambulance use impossible.
Defenders of Israel's actions also repeat the absurd human shields claim ad nauseum. Some others, who are decidedly not Likudniks, have also bought into this assertion or some other variant, such as arguing that Palestinians voted for Hamas so this somehow makes them legitimate targets for death from Israel's bombs, tanks, rockets, and guns.
Gaza, as others have pointed out, is one of the most densely populated places in the world. This density is not something the Palestinians imposed upon themselves. It is something that Israel itself has created and enforced. (I am reminded here of my response as a child when first hearing that the Irish starved because of the potato blight: why did the Irish plant only potatoes? It wasn't until many years later that I learned that the land the British permitted the Irish to use could only grow potatoes.)
Where are the Hamas fighters going to go and not be among civilians?Even if Hamas was using civilians as human shields, and there is no evidence that it is, Israel's war tactics (and its preceding occupation and blockade of the entire civilian population of Gaza) are designed to target everyone. This is a war that Israel's been preparing for for at least a year.
The form of collective punishment being carried out by Israel - converting Gaza into a free fire zone - is a war crime under international law.
Who is doing what to the civilians? Who exactly is treating civilians as cannon fodder here?
Israel's refusal to tend to civilians and ensure their safety, since they are the occupying and invading power, is another war crime.
One of the express terms of the cease-fire that Israel and its apologists keep bleating about the violation of by Hamas was that Israel would lift its blockade of Gaza. Israel failed to lift its blockade, thus violating the cease-fire's terms from the start.
Israel's disproportionate response to Hamas' attacks is also against international law and against basic principles of common criminal law - you are not, even if provoked, permitted to engage in unfettered retaliation and you are certainly not allowed to go after innocents.
Israel's complaints that Hamas is using human shields represents the tired old refrain of imperial powers going after a population in resistance.
The British complained that the Americans in the American Revolution weren't standing up in neat rows and were instead hiding behind trees and rocks. How unfair!
Americans during the Vietnam War complained that the Vietnamese were not standing up and identifying themselves and instead, shockingly, living in and amongst the people! Imagine that: guerrilla fighters who live among the people! How peculiar! Why don't they live in barracks like the Americans? In response to this monstrously unfair mode of fighting, as infamously uttered by an American soldier while the village was going up in flames: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
Professor Rashid Khalidi in a 1/7/09 New York Times Op-Ed quotes Moshe Yaalon, then Israel's Defense Chief, as saying in 2002: "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people."
This is Israel's aim: to destroy the will of the Palestinian people. This is the aim of all occupying, settler and of imperialist states: to wipe out the resistance of the people they are oppressing.
I would not be the first person to point out the terrible irony that from among the Jewish people, a people who have suffered so long from discrimination and pogroms in history, most spectacularly during the Holocaust, and a people who can claim from among its ranks so very many who have a long and proud history of being on the side of justice (and can continue to so claim), that there should emerge from this people a political trend - Zionism - that advocates revenge and carries out the systematic dispossession and methodical destruction of a people - the Palestinians - and are thereby doing to others precisely what has historically been done to them as a people.
The crimes against humanity of Israel in Gaza reflect, as Gary Kamiya wrote the other day at Salon, a moral collapse.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
Watching Frogs Boil
Karen McKim
Erica K
Jennifer Prestholdt
Julie Morse
Salon.com
Comments
A timely explanation of international law and Israel's twisted observation can be read at:
http://counterpunch.org/lamb01082009.html
I find your post well-reasoned and informed.
It points up the fact that attack of civilians has replaced the standard military clash of armies. In WWI, there was one civiian killed for every solderi; now, those numbers are reversed and are increased by hundreds.
In modern conflicts, both war and sanctions target civilians and are expressly designed to make a people overthrow their government. Israel is attempting to overthrow Hamas by killing civilians, a third of the total of killed and injured which are children as the UN reports today.
The fact that a third of US foreign aid is munitions to Israel gives us the right to discuss this.
Thank you for your post.
Watching live news coverage from Gaza yesterday morning, I swear I saw the explosion of a cluster bomb. A CLUSTER Bomb, for krisakes!
How can anyone with a heart see that as other than criminal?
Wayne, you weren't just imagining cluster bombs. Ha'aretz (admittedly left of center) reported it a few days ago: www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1052331.html
WOOF
I am going out on a limb here but am I correct to summarise that the fact that the Palestininian is Olive skinned makes his life less valuebale than say a Georgian who is not? I am sure that many are wondering the same thing but not wanting to ask the question. I mean no disrespect.
One more thing, EGYPT is complicit and so is Abbas! How else would president for life, Hosni Mubarak pay his cronies and army had it not been for US Aid which is second only to Israel. Israel is merely doing the ground work for the PA headed by Abbas to retake what he democratically lost being Gaza. Please remember that Abbas lost the vote to Hamas for one reason. The PA administration was corrupt and despotic who squandered the funding received on their lavish life-styles and not on their constituency, the man on the street in palestine. Hamas then forcibly took control of the Gaza after Abbas failed to award them with their democratically won right but instead started summary executions of Hamas members.
Fot the record, Hamas has distanced themselves away from Al Qaeda, if such an organisation really does exist at all. The Israeli intelligence services confirm that there is NO link as well.
Go well, stay safe and pray for peace.
Hamas have not despatched a single 'suicide' bomber to Israel for more than three years now.......I certainly hope that the disproportianate force being unleashed by Israel does not lead to such....
Apologists for the Israelis actions sat that Israel is doing this to enhance it’s “deterrence capability”. Well, what does this mean in layman’s language? It means the ability to terrorize everyone into submission. It means saying “we’re wealthy, we’re well armed, and we are crazy as shit. If you mess with us, we will destroy you.” That’s an important perception to have in the region, especially when your aims are unjust- and when I say unjust, I am not just being pejorative: justice implies some recognition of a balancing of fulfilled interests on both sides, and Israel won’t even acknowledge the Palestinians HAVE interests.
Time is of the essence for Israel: a new American president takes office in twelve days- whose support for Israel is likely to be more qualified than that of the current occupying vacancy, Israeli elections are coming up- in which a successful and completed operation in Gaza is essential to retaining power, and the Palestinians are also having elections soon.
Thanks again for posting this. It is awesome to see real substantive discussion emerging on the topic. It restores my faith in the OS community.
CCC: You are exactly right about the "human shields" defense being a war crime itself. It mimics the "Batterer's Defense" of "she made me do it."
Stellaa: exactly. Their complicity is immense. Ditto Bearded One on Egypt's complicity.
Jewish historical experience and its impact on self-perception have a huge part to play in the current conflict. But is this irony? Hmmm, I wouldn't say so.
I saw a video of a Hamas leader about human shields that Amy posted. The translation of the Arabic to English wasn't entirely correct and threw the speech out of context.
Thank you for this, Dennis.
I do think that suffering is often ennobling and therefore acting as shamefully and horribly as Zionists are is ironic.
(My own view: the consequences of suffering and powerless are unpredictable, and are at least as likely to corrupt as to ennoble. The association of suffering with moral virtue is attractive from a religious point of view, but I don't think it holds up to scrutiny).
Oppression overall historically produces resistance. (I would prefer to put it this way rather than to say that it is ennobling, by the way.) This is evident throughout history in a very pronounced way.
Among those who are oppressed are those who react in a different fashion. Some are crushed and abandon all hope. Some identify with the oppressor. Some make deals with the oppressor and in return for oppressing their own people, are rewarded with some privileges. Zionists are a case of oppressed people who have become oppressors.
++++++++++++++
There is something that makes me quite uncomfortable about this formulation, for reasons that I can't quite put my finger one. I'll have a stab though, and I think it is this: with the irony comes the edge of "they should know better, seeing as how they were so oppressed themselves." The unironic flip side of that is Ben Sen's psychological account "they can't help their psychosis, seeing as how they have been so oppressed themselves." Both of these are unsatisfactory.
Clearly Africans in Namibia were oppressed during the Apartheid years (and before). Now the Khoisan minority is arguably being oppressed by the Namibian nationalist (mainly Bantu) majority. I never hear this referred to as "ironic" - as if there is some narrative meaning in it all, beyond the fact that nationalisms pursue their own goals.
Perhaps you'd prefer a different term for it, but I was using the term in this sense of irony: "incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result."
Yes, I would expect, and history in general bears this out, in most cases, a people who have been oppressed are more likely (not inevitably, just more likely) to empathize with others who are oppressed because of their experiences. And as I said above, in any group that is oppressed you will find a segment who identify with oppressors and not the oppressed.
I am not, having said all of that, deeply wedded to my using the term ironic here. I think that the point, if I had tried to make a bigger point in the original essay, would have been that there is an incongruity here between the experience of Jews as a group that has faced discrimination and pogroms and the nature of Zionism.
The issue isn't whether it's ironic or not. The issue is that Zionism is the ideology of people who are oppressing other people - specifically, the Palestinian people.
As I wrote in my last response to you "[H]istory in general bears this out, in most cases, a people who have been oppressed are more likely (not inevitably, just more likely) to empathize with others who are oppressed because of their experiences."
You will note that I was NOT referring to instances where once oppressed people become the new rulers, which is what you in your last post refer to. You are mixing up two different, though no doubt related, phenomena: what oppressed people do in response to oppression (my point) and what formerly oppressed people do when they take power (your point).
I am a materialist and so my take on this is not infused by either religious elements or by psychologizing. There is no inevitable character to this, only tendencies, albeit pronounced tendencies.
As a materialist, to address your point, I would say that there are certainly lots of instances where people who have been formerly subordinate and who become the new rulers become new oppressors. Blacks such as Clarence Thomas and various black mayors or senators come immediately to mind. Former Mayor of Philadelphia Wilson Goode (under whom the murder and bombing of MOVE happened) is a particularly egregious example of this. Women who become leaders such as Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher are also pertinent to this.
My original and continuing point about the Jews was NOT that it is ironic that the State of Israel is led by Zionists and that the Zionists are oppressing the Palestinians. They are not "bucking the trend" as you say (it was never my point that they are "bucking the trend").
My point was a rhetorical one in the main, that there is irony here. The underlying point and implicit point, however, is that oppression breeds resistance among people who are oppressed. This can be seen in the disproportionate representation (to their credit) among Jews worldwide of their involvement in struggles for justice historically and today.
Finally, as a materialist, it is definitively true that once people occupy positions of power, that there are strong, material factors that TEND to push ELEMENTS among them into becoming new tyrants. This is a tendency only and it exists in relation to other very powerful factors, more powerful in the long run, such as, especially, the nature of the mode of production. In case this is confusing, I would very briefly (since this would be a long treatise to lay out in its entirety) mention that slave rebellions (e.g., that led by Spartacus in Ancient Rome) and that of the black slave rebellions in the US ended slavery eventually. The system that took slavery's place was overall a major advance over slavery - that is, life was better - to put it simply - for those who were formerly the slaves. Women who have rebelled in history have spearheaded dramatic changes for women. The fact that some individual women who take on certain leading positions have been poor representatives of women in general and been like the men they replaced does not undercut the importance of those who have been held down rising up. Furthermore, while black cops can sometimes be worse than white cops in their treatment of blacks, there is also the fact that some among black cops are better than their brethren cops because they are black and have those experiences as blacks. Do you get my drift?
The story of the State of Israel is complex in that there are different elements at work here. One of them of course is the history and nature of Zionism. Another is that the State of Israel is premised on exclusion of the inhabitants of the land that they have established themselves upon. If both of these factors were not present in the degree to which they are, that is, if there were a democratic, secular state in Palestine in which Jews and Palestinians and others lived together, and if Zionism were not the dominant trend, then things would be very different. There is a matter of historical contingency here - i.e., things are not written in stone and different paths can be taken.
http://open.salon.com/user_blog.php?uid=10275
Criticism of Zionism is NOT anti-semitism!
http://open.salon.com/user_blog.php?uid=10275